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A lot of movies that remind us of current events just end up bumming us out. Green Room, the 2015 horror/thriller which is now available to stream on Netflix, is definitely the exception to that rule. If you’re depressed and alarmed that Nazis seem to be more of a problem in America than they were before, then might I interest you in a film where a punk band travels to a gig at what turns out to be a neo-Nazi stronghold and then must fight their way out when they witness a murder in the green room offstage? The film is bloody, thrilling, and awfully satisfying from a killing-Nazis perspective.
Green Room comes from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, director of the recent murder-among-the-wolves Netflix thriller Hold the Dark. Saulnier had preceded Green Room with his Kickstarter-funded revenge thriller Blue Ruin. That film went on to play the Cannes Film Festival and win prizes and generally established Saulnier as an indie filmmaker to watch. Green Room paid off that anticipation in spades. The setup was tantalizing in its simplicity: the band — including Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, and Anton Yelchin, in the last film that would be released before his April 2016 death — are fantastic horror-movie protagonists as they scramble for any weapons available and try to devise an escape strategy.
The one complication throw in there is that the Nazis are led by Patrick Stewart, who could not be a more inherently likable actor, especially to the genre-loyalist fans that Green Room is pitched to. How is Captain Picard (sporting a truly horrendous Southern accent, it should be noted) going to come out here like a Nazi leader. Is this a joke about his bald head?
And yet it all works. Green Room manages to be scary, intense, more funny than it has any right to be, and possessed of a genuine spark of energy within its characters. Yelchin and Imogen Poots in particular make for a scrappy pair of survivors, and while he’d end up being in a handful of films released posthumously, Green Room plays as well as an elegy for the spark we lost when he died than any of his other films, even amid the blood and gore.
